Free Republic

A few months after moving into the White House, President Obama promised to reduce the large deficit in 2010 and continue reducing it further in 2011. This promise was broken, and the deficit in 2010 is expected to be approximately $200 billion more than in 2009. This creates political danger for Democrats, as the party in power is reluctant to acknowledge its stewardship of worsening budget problems with midterm elections coming in November. As a result, congressional Democrats are shying away from a vote on this year's budget resolution, causing chaos to the federal budgeting process. Avoiding a budget resolution...

The first warning was in mid February, the bad news was that led by China, foreign countries dumped U.S. Treasury bills at a record rate in December. The worry was that the weak marketplace lead to a rise in interest rates to make the bills more attractive to investors. The interest rate rise which could be the beginning of an inflationary period. According to the Treasury Department foreign holdings of U.S. Treasury bills fell by a record $53 billion in December. That topped the previous record drop of $44.5 billion in April 2009. In the intervening six weeks since the...

While the global economy is crawling out from the most severe recession and financial crisis of the postwar period, the euro zone debt crisis has significantly increased the chances of a double-dip recession in Europe and a global slowdown. Sovereign risk has recently graduated from being an emerging economy hitch to an advanced economy problem. The Greek debt crisis has occupied center stage of the economic and political debate. It is not just a Greek tragedy--the contagion could spread to Portugal, Spain, Italy and Ireland. Indeed, at stake is the entire euro zone framework. Yet fiscal sustainability and sovereign risk...

The bursting of the real estate bubble and the ensuing recession have hurt jobs, home prices and now Social Security. This year, the system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Stephen C. Goss, chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, said that while the Congressional projection would probably be borne out, the change would have no effect on benefits in 2010 and retirees would keep receiving their checks as usual. The problem, he said, is...

Democrats have so thoroughly gamed the budget process and the Congressional Budget Office’s scoring rules that the official cost estimates of the Obama health plan reveal but a sliver of the legislation’s full cost. The Obama plan would vastly increase the size and scope of the federal government, and increase our already record federal deficit. To hear Democrats tell it, the CBO projects the legislation would cost a mere $940 billion over the next 10 years. The CBO said no such thing: that figure pertains only to provisions aimed at expanding health insurance. Other spending provisions bring the cost to...

Responding to an inquiry from Rep. Paul Ryan, the Congressional Budget Office has confirmed that when you remove certain accounting gimmicks from the Democrats' health care legislation, it actually increases the deficit. Democrats have touted a CBO report that found that their health care bill would reduce the deficit by $138 billion from 2010 to 2019. But that number assumes that hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare cuts would be used to pay for the new health care entitlement. In a letter to Ryan, the CBO estimates that if the Medicare cuts were used to help shore up the...

February 2009 produced the largest monthly budget deficit in the United States government's history. The U.S. Treasury announced that February's budget deficit came in at a staggering $220.9 billion. The addition of February's record monthly deficit results in a deficit of $655 billion for the first five months of fiscal 2010...

AP's Andrew Taylor hits the media cyberwaves with the news that today's CBO analysis of Obama's 2011 budget plans would generate deficits totalling $9.8 trillion over the next decade.... $1.2 trillion more than predicted. But just as Harry Reid sluffed off a job loss of 36K last month as "a big day in America" Taylor also attempts to soften the blow. The agency says its future-year predictions of tax revenues are more pessimistic than the administration's. That's because CBO projects slightly slower economic growth than the White House. The deficit picture has turned alarmingly worse since the recession that started...

President Obama's decision to appoint his close political ally, union leader Andrew Stern, to the newly created National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform has set off a firestorm of criticism from business and conservative groups who charge he is a political radical who should be investigated for failure to register as a lobbyist. President Obama's decision to appoint his close political ally, union leader Andrew Stern, to the newly created National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform has set off a firestorm of criticism from business and conservative groups who charge he is a political radical who should be...

President Obama's proposed budget would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, congressional budget analysts said Friday. Proposed tax cuts for the middle class account for nearly a third of that shortfall. The 10-year outlook released by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is somewhat gloomier than White House projections, which found that Obama's budget request would produce deficits that would add about $8.5 trillion to the national debt by 2020. The CBO and the White House are in relative agreement about the short-term budget picture, with both predicting a deficit of about $1.5 trillion...

The federal deficit would hit $1.5 trillion in 2010 under President Barack Obama's proposals, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected Friday. The nonpartisan budget office said it projected a deficit measuring 10.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) this year, and a $1.3 trillion deficit in 2011 that would measure 8.9 percent of next year's GDP.

President Barack Obama's budget will lead to deficits averaging nearly $1 trillion over the next decade, the CBO estimated Friday. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said President Barack Obama's budget would lead to annual deficits averaging nearly $1 trillion for the next decade. The estimates are for larger deficits than the budget shortfalls expected by the White House. Annual deficits under Obama’s budget plan would be about $976 billion from 2011 through 2020, according to a CBO analysis of Obama's plan released Friday.

In January, the Senate joined the House in passing "pay-as-you-go" rules to require Congress to pay for new discretionary spending. On Feb. 12, President Obama signed the bill. "Now Congress will have to pay for what it spends, just like everybody else," Obama crowed. Less than a month later, Obama and fellow Democrats are busily demonizing a lone senator for pushing Washington to spend responsibly. It seems this administration is all for fiscal restraint — as long as you don't mean it. The story began last week when Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., blocked Senate passage of a bill to extend...

WASHINGTON – To the increasing discomfort of his fellow Republicans, Sen. Jim Bunning on Tuesday again blocked the Senate from extending unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies for the jobless. The Kentucky Republican objected to a request by Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a fellow Republican, to pass a 30-day extension of jobless benefits and other expired measures. The measure would also extend highway programs and prevent a big cut in Medicare payments to doctors. Bunning has been single-handedly blocking the stopgap legislation since Thursday... ----- Bunning made the following quotes on the floor of the United States Senate: "I believe...

An alternative budget proposal submitted by Congressman Paul Ryan (Wis.), the House Budget Committee's Republican ranking member, would increase the federal budget deficit even more than President Obama's bloated budget — nearly $1 trillion more — according to a February 24 analysis by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Ryan's “alternative policy scenario” would make no serious spending cuts, but it would institute three new tax cuts. CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf explained to Ryan that “the three changes to the tax policy assumptions are estimated to increase deficits relative to the baseline projections by $9 billion in 2010 and $3.4 trillion...

From The Sunday Times February 21, 2010 Angry voters will force action on runaway deficit Irwin Stelzer: American Account So all is coming right. Sales of existing homes in the final quarter of last year were 27.2% above the 2008 level. Home construction jumped 2.8% in January, to its highest level in six months. The mining, manufacturing and utilities sectors also grew at satisfactory rates as did retail sales. So confident is the Federal Reserve in the recovery that it has raised a key interest rate. Alas, every silver lining has a cloud — in the case of the American...

In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama said that "families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions," so the "federal government should do the same." The following week, the president presented his new budget, which contains $1.267 trillion in new deficit spending. So much for cinching up the belt. Elsewhere in his address, the president said, "Let me start the discussion of government spending by setting the record straight." But, in his subsequent words, he barely even mentioned his own deficit spending. This, of course, will not do. If we are to set...

If the tea party movement is the soul of small government and personal responsibility, the Republican Party is the institutional body conservatives need to regain control over government run amok. You can't have one without the other, says Bill Whittle. The transcript of this video essay is below. IMHO: video is better - Bill Whittle's presentation is characteristically passionate; and his passion is contagious. Well, the Tea party movement is not even a year old, and already it is holding its first national convention. I was honored to be asked to speak at the West Los Angeles event on September...

Left-wing economist, Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman hates deficits in tough economic times -- when the president of the United States is named George W. Bush. Krugman, in a November 2004 interview, criticized the "enormous" Bush deficit. "We have a world-class budget deficit," he said, "not just as in absolute terms, of course -- it's the biggest budget deficit in the history of the world -- but it's a budget deficit that, as a share of GDP, is right up there." The numbers? The deficit in fiscal year 2004 -- $413 billion, 3.5 percent of the...

Unveiling his latest budget proposal, President Barack Obama announced: “The bottom line is this: We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don’t have consequences; as if waste doesn’t matter; as if the hard-earned tax dollars of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money; as if we can ignore this challenge for another generation.” Unfortunately, few in Washington are listening -- including the president himself. His budget would boost spending to $3.8 trillion in the next fiscal year. It would generate a $1.5 trillion deficit for next year alone, on top of the trillions American taxpayers already...